As 2020 draws to a close, it's time for information security firms to release their "worst passwords of the year" lists. The first contender comes from NordPass, the password management division of NordVPN, and familiar items top the list.

The most commonly used password in 2020 was the succinct "123456," with about 2.5 million entries in NordPass' sample data, according to NordPass; the second most common was "123456789," with only 961,000 entries; the second most common was "123456789," with only 961,000 entries. The venerable "12345" of "Spaceballs" fame is not even in eighth place.

Needless to say, these passwords do not protect your account. For true password security, make all your important passwords (those protecting your social media, banking, email, and shopping accounts) long and complex, never reuse passwords for sensitive accounts, and use the best password manager.

We are not sure how seriously to take NordPass' findings on passwords; the NordPass press release states only that the list was "created in partnership with a third-party provider and includes a total of 275,699,516 passwords We evaluated the database."

It only states.

We asked NordPass who the third-party provider was, where the database came from, and how old the dataset was. myspace1" is ranked 80th, which means that some samples may be quite old, and that in 2014 There appears to be some overlap with the "dump" earlier this year of 33.7 million passwords stolen from LiveJournal.

In any case, there are 200 "worst" passwords ranked by the number of times they appear in the data set, and you can see the list of terrible passwords on the NordPass website. Almost all of the recognizable words are in English, making one wonder if this list is truly universal. Many of the others are either numeric sequences or the result of typing adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard.

The top non-English word was "senha" at #10, which one of my colleagues noted means "password" in Portuguese. The English word "password" is in fourth place.

The most puzzling entries are "aaron431" at #18, "ohmnamah23" (possibly a Hindu invocation) at #62, and "a801016" at #138. (According to Urban Dictionary, "anhyeuem" at #102 is one form of "I love you" in Vietnamese.)

At least, it would be a little harder to guess or "decipher" using a computer algorithm than the rest of the "worst" 200 entries. If you know what any of these words mean, please send them to us in the comments section.